Someone messaged me and said they admired us for playing out the “horrors” of IVF so publicly so people could a) understand or b) if they were going through it themselves find some comfort that someone else out there knew how they felt.

Jesus, this is post number 22. That’s a lot of my dribble. Well mainly my dribble, some of it has been Kim’s pearls of wisdom. I’ve said this a lot but way back when we started writing we did it to help others.

Boy it’s getting tense isn’t it? Saturday was transfer day, when the fertilised embryo we had was getting put back in to one of Kim’s uteri. We went in for our appointment. Kim had to drink 750ml of water immediately before-hand because apparently an enlarged bladder makes it easier for the doctor doing the transfer to see where to go on the scan.

On Monday we went in for egg harvesting. Last time we did that we managed to get 5 eggs out which isn’t a great result but we were very happy because we’d been expecting 3 max. This time we tried not to have expectations because of the 5 they got out last time, precisely zero fertilised. Which sucked.

As I write this it’s 5.30pm on a Sunday afternoon. It’s the day before we do egg collection. It’s been 26 days since we began this IVF round. It’s been the most hopeful round so far. But hope can always betray you, and when it does it hurts more than if you’d just been pessimistic the whole time.

When you’ve made a commitment to writing out your story, and then that story ends up being way longer than you anticipated, you go searching for metaphors to represent what you’re going through because metaphors are one of the great pieces of human story telling.

Two and a half months ago I had a shitty birthday when our most recent IVF round got called off. I wrote about that already. But the part I left out of the story was going to the vege market immediately after the IVF clinic.

It seems I take about two days to mentally process things. After the shitter of all birthdays where we had been at the clinic on Sunday morning being told that Kim had the cyst on one ovary and that this fucked everything up and so we should can the round then and there, we got into the elevator and I actually burst out laughing.